Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

Amazon.com will invest as much as $4 billion in Anthropic, bagging a crucial partner in its effort to become a major player in generative artificial intelligence and offering a vote of confidence in the hot startup.

As part of the deal, Anthropic will move most of its software to Amazon Web Services data centers, and use the cloud computing company's homegrown chips to train the models it uses to power chatbots and other applications. Besides getting access to Amazon's computing power, Anthropic will gain a financial infusion that will help it pay the huge costs required to train and run massive AI models. 

AWS Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky said in an interview on Bloomberg Television that the company's initial investment in Anthropic is $1.25 billion. Amazon will have a minority position in the startup, the companies said in a statement on Monday. 

Read more: IT departments, stretched thin amid hybrid work, are craving AI support

AWS is the world's largest seller of on-demand computing power and data storage. But it has been widely seen as a laggard in the emerging field of computer models trained to generate text, images and other content because it has lacked both a hit product and a high-profile exclusive partner in the arena. ChatGPT creator OpenAI runs its software on Microsoft's data centers, a partnership based on a $13 billion investment that has sparked a renewal for Amazon's Seattle-area neighbor.

"Amazon's $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic may not move the financial needle for its cloud-services unit in the near term, but shows that it's taking Microsoft's perceived AI leadership seriously," Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Poonam Goyal wrote in a note Monday. 

Read more: Is AI essential to the recruitment process? It's complicated

Amazon executives have said that it's early days for so-called generative AI, and that more than 100,000 customers have used the company's machine-learning tools to date. Anthropic's foundational model, called Claude, was already available as part of an Amazon service called Bedrock, still in early release, that makes both Amazon and third-party models available to its customers. 

Founded by OpenAI veterans, Anthropic has raised more than $1 billion to date with a pitch to make a safer kind of chatbot for such tasks as summarizing, searching, answering questions and coding. The company's backers include Alphabet's Google, which invested almost $400 million in Anthropic, Bloomberg reported in February. Google is also an AWS cloud rival and builder of models used in generative AI.